Accidental Notes: A Novel

Manuscript Evaluation: Part 2

How does an editor provide feedback on a book?

I usually send edit letters as one long Microsoft Word document, but for the sake of Medium, I’ve split the one I wrote for Accidental Notes into two parts. The first part talks about the plot, structure, and pacing of the story and can be found here:

This part focuses on character arcs, theme, setting, and dialogue.

Style

The style of the book is literary, with a focus on how the words sound on the page. It’s quiet and lyrical and pretty to read. Unfortunately, as we’ll talk about more later, this means that we have a great skin on broken bones. Fortunately, there are no wasted words when you’re writing something, and your words aren’t precious. You’ve done it once, and you can do it again.

Characters

In a book this “quiet,” characters are the most important part. This is part of why I think Accidental Notes is good, and part of why I think it isn’t working as written. I want to talk about each character below: their traits, their arc, what’s working, and what isn’t. This is going to tie in a lot with the plot, structure, and pacing we talk about in part one, but I want to put it here, too.

Adaya

Adaya Finley is a 15-year-old freshman who lives in California with her mother. She prefers for everything to be planned down to the detail, so a spontaneous trip to Bend to visit family she hasn’t seen in five years is a big struggle for her. She loves music and piano but hates improvising, and likes to know everything. Her need to understand everything is what drives the mystery part of this plot, as she pries into her past and tries to figure out the secrets her family is hiding.

Adaya has a positive change arc, from rigid and unwilling to compromise or be spontaneous to someone more comfortable in her own skin and willing to improvise both in music and in life. While the arc plays out well on the page, it’s influenced most by Grayson, her ally and love interest, rather than her father, the antagonist. In fact, her arc and the plot run as parallel lines rather than intertwined ones. An Adaya who is willing to be spontaneous and not know everything would be okay not knowing all the mysteries of her brother. But that isn’t what happens. The arc around the mystery of her brother is more about her willingness to move on into the future versus her dad’s insistence of staying stuck in the past.

Mr. Finley

Without a doubt, Adaya’s father is the antagonist in this story. But his methods of keeping her from what she wants are convoluted, because what Adaya expresses most is wanting her auditions, not wanting to know her family history. While he sort of keeps her from the music she wants to learn, this antagonism is tangential rather than active. It just… makes the story feel like it doesn’t fully fit together.

Mr. Finley himself is stuck in a past from before his first child died, refusing to move on from that and both submersing himself in and running from the life he had with Brennan. He’s become a shell of a man, unable to live life, frozen the moment Brennan died. He’s passive and conflict averse and extremely unwell, and these traits all come across on the page. He occasionally tries to be there for Adaya, but his attempts are random and usually come as a way of appeasing her and keeping her from breaking open the wounds he doesn’t want to talk about.

I honestly really like how he’s drawn. He’s a good antagonist in a family drama like you’ve written here. I just wish that Adaya’s changes had more to do with him, or even that she had a flat arc that worked to change him, rather than his character remaining unchanged throughout.

Grayson

Grayson is Adaya’s old musical and academic rival. She fought with him just before moving to California, and his own wound is the opposite of Adaya’s: he prefers improvisation because plans break and never come to fruition, and if you have low expectations, you can’t be disappointed.

He and Adaya serve as foils for one another. Grayson teaches Adaya how to improvise, and she teaches him that some things are okay to write down. In fact, sometimes writing them down is necessary.

Like I’ve mentioned and will continue to mention, the Grayson/Adaya story of improv vs. planning is done well and executed according to the structures I use most. It just doesn’t help with the mystery at all, which is part of why the story feels disjointed, or mismatched on the page.

The Finley Family

Adaya’s family in Bend is sprawling. Aunt Patricia, Uncle Jeff, Meghan and Liam, Lauren, Kyle and his husband… and those are the ones I remember offhand. I think your reasoning in a large family here was to make Adaya feel even more left out: there is this entire family unit that Adaya and her mother got separated from and couldn’t connect to anymore, and Adaya barely knows them.

While I don’t think it’s super necessary to remove that element — Adaya feeling like a fish out of water in her own family home works well — I do wish that the characters who are important handled things differently from one another. Why do they all agree to keep Brennan hushed up, for the most part? how do they process this trauma differently from one another? How can we show that some of their bonding is over the trauma and the alcoholism they’ve let run rampant in the wake of Brennan’s death?

Mr. Gutierrez

Mr. G has been a father figure to Adaya since she moved to California, and Adaya learns in the midst of this story that he and her mother are seriously dating and intend to marry. His character ties in well with the theme of moving on versus staying stuck in the past, but his character shows up most in relation to the way-too-many auditions Adaya thinks about over the course of the story. If we can condense it to just the one audition at the end, and have him show up on the phone with Ms. Finley and create that tension between past and future in the familial sense, the story might read better on the page.

Harmony

I’m including the dog here only because something a beta reader said to me about this story has stuck in my mind: if Mr. Finley is our antagonist, the golden retriever shouldn’t like him. We should trust the opinions of animals in stories, and Harmony getting along with Mr. Finley doesn’t fit this mold. Breaking the mold isn’t working, either, because it’s basically a red herring “save the cat” moment. If Mr. Finley can get along with a puppy, it shows he can learn to accept new things and move on, which is something that doesn’t happen in the story as written. So deciding about Mr. Finley means deciding about his relationship with the dog, too. If he can change, we can keep Harmony loving him. If the point is that he can’t change, then Harmony should see that.

Theme

This is unusual for me, because theme is absolutely what I live for, but there are times when the plot is sacrificed in favor of building thematic ideas, and I think it detracts from the story. Rather than organic decision making, it can feel episodic: good sentences strung together without much of a reason for them besides wanting to illustrate some metaphorical point.

The theme is overwhelmingly about Adaya letting go of her perfectionism and learning to improv. Her growth is obvious, and the scenes are constructed well in the beginning and the end to show her movement from rigid and worried about structure to more willing to improvise.

Where this falls apart for me, beyond being a little too on the nose/hammered into the reader, is that the main plot isn’t about improvisation so much as it’s about not getting stuck living in the past.

The more evaluations I write, the more I find that solutions to one problem tend to work best in tandem with another problem. In this case, theme and character arc are inextricably linked, and any change to one will necessitate a change to the other. Since Adaya’s arc is from rigid to willing to improv, if we change this to something regarding the past, most likely she will have the Truth — that we can’t wallow in the past, but can use it to make decisions about the future — question it in the middle, and reveal it to her family at the end. They would be the ones who change.

That makes for a decent arc over the course of the book, but it might tell a different story than you wanted to. If your point was instead that Adaya has outgrown a family stuck in the past, and her father in particular is incapable of moving on, it would likely be structured differently. That said, I want to challenge you to think through this, as intentional as it was in a first draft. I remember hearing once that YA novels can handle any theme but nihilism, and as-is, this book gets very close to nihilist. Your goal might have been to show that Adaya doesn’t need her family to move on with her life, but she’s only fifteen. Maybe instead you can let her dad learn what he needs to from her and inject more hope in to her family life.

I often remind my clients that when an editor provides a solution, it could very well be the wrong solution, but there is likely a problem to be solved regardless. So take my advice as to specific ideas with a grain of salt, but I think the story would best be served by thoroughly considering what you want to say with this piece, and how you want your readers to feel when they reach the end.

Dialogue

The dialogue in Accidental Notes is…okay. There are some things done well — like much of the family’s evasiveness and how young children are written — but dialogue between Grayson and Adaya especially felt contrived to me. I’m not sure the balance is there yet when it comes to creating tension and revealing character.

Part of what I think is falling flat here is that in an attempt to work toward reveals, some of the back and forth feels stilted — put on by the author because Adaya and the reader will need the information rather than flowing naturally. While the Finley family’s attempts at evasion actually do read well on the page in some parts, the reveals lack tension. Information is given, rather than won, even if it’s at the end of a bunch of push-pull. Then there is a lack of conflict between people once the information is provided. It tends to resolve rather than make situations worse.

I find this to be an especially tough problem in a book where everyone is pathologically conflict averse. Adaya pushes and everyone pulls away. Sometimes she has an ally in Meghan, but her allyship feels almost too given rather than earned, and I think we could remove information if Adaya gets information in ways that build conflict more often.

Additionally, there’s something I read about called “gunnysacking,” which is when someone conflict-averse avoids tension and sweeps things under the rug but holds grudges that finally explode so that when the problem comes to blow, it’s not one issue but all of them. Adaya does this in the scene with the piano, but her dad, and even Meghan and Grayson, could do with similar blow-ups if we’re going to keep everyone afraid of conflict.

Setting

Most of the novel is set within Bend, Oregon, and much of the time in Bend is spent within Adaya’s deceased grandmother’s house. The setting descriptions are done well. I love the way Adaya filters her descriptions through her emotions at the time, and the language is aptly poetic whenever setting is described. It contributes beautifully to the mood of the whole book, too. Setting a book where many of the characters are set in the past in a world of a snowstorm, where everything is eerily still, and then within an old house filled with memories that evokes similar eeriness, was one of my favorite parts of this story. Atmospheric is definitely an apt descriptor, and some of the sentences that stood out the most to me as I read were setting descriptions that built off of mood and emotion.

My one concern here is how setting plays a role in the repetitiveness I found in the pacing. As we return to the same places over and over again, how can we make sure something new is learned — either about the past or the present — every time? This happens best at Grandma Nancy’s but I think it doesn’t happen at all at Grayson’s house, and it could be a moment that impacts the time Adaya spends in her dad’s truck as well.

Conclusion

Edit letters can be tough to receive, especially when they’re asking for the possibility of changing everything. If you’re anything like Adaya, this is likely going to be tricky. I’d like to encourage you to consider what this book would look like as a mystery with a flat arc, as well as what it would look like for Adaya’s flat arc to change her family and help them move on from their past. The ending might be happy-ish for Adaya right now, but I think her character would be more powerful if she can pull her family along with her into the future in some way. I also think we need to streamline the audition process, and find ways for the scenes to feel less repetitive, while raising the stakes of any individual moment. What small conflicts can we bring to light? How can there be more push/pull and more fallout? How can chapters end in a way that requires the reader to keep going?

In the midst of this, don’t let go of Adaya’s heart and voice. Your writing style is beautiful and I don’t want the book to lose its atmospheric quality, especially when the idea of a frozen place contributes thematically so well to a family frozen in time. I wouldn’t push you this far if I didn’t think there was potential here, and Adaya’s story and your craft have the potential to be great. I absolutely believe that and believe in you.

~ Rochelle